Comment & Analysis
It's sunny Phoenix, Arizona, this time round for the annual Solidworks World convention, which has attracted an incredible 5,500 engineers keen to learn about the latest advances in 3D product design.
Amid the copious amounts of dry ice and razzmatazz that is the hallmark of the event, it is possible to spot some clearly identifiable trends that are set to change the way that engineers go about their jobs.
The clues are in two oft-repeated buzzwords – social and collaboration. Engineers no longer sit at their desks designing in isolation. Now it's all about sharing concepts and ideas, mainly through the cloud, resulting in greater teamwork and more optimised outputs.
That's the vision, anyway, and it can be seen with the launch of Solidworks Industrial Design, the second Solidworks application made available on parent company's Dassault Systemes 3DExperience platform, which has social collaboration through the cloud at its heart.
Solidworks believes that constraints of traditional industrial design software, including data incompatibility, extensive rework of designs and a disconnect between industrial and mechanical design teams, lack of collaboration during the design process and difficulty in evaluating multiple concepts, can slow down the product design process and reduce cost efficiency and time-to-market.
The launch of Industrial Design attempts to eliminate these barriers by offering a single modelling environment that improves the overall industrial design process. Social design capabilities and transparent data management allow engineers and designers to solve industrial design challenges and easily transition to mechanical design. Safe, secure, intelligent data storage on the cloud can be accessed anytime from anywhere to share designs, collaborate on ideas, save and evaluate multiple concepts.
The software allows engineers to create complex shapes in 3D and add mechanical data directly to a model without changing product design software or environment. Concept sketching, integrated freeform and parametric surface/solid modelling, direct editing, realistic rendering and simplified design evolution tools are all features of the process.
Solidworks is betting big on Industrial Design. Like Conceptual Design, the first application introduced on 3D Experience, it has collaboration through the cloud as the central tenet of its appeal. Solidworks believes that engineers will be able to quicken development times and lower costs. And they will do so by being social.